Chock-full of surprises, insight, and learning opportunities.
A collection features oddities from around the world and bizarre facts amassed during the last 100 years.
Readers with a penchant for unusual things will find a bevy of them in this oversized, full-color collection compiled by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (Odd Is Art, 2018, etc.). The book is divided into broad categories that frequently merge, including animals, pop culture, and people. An extensive index, however, can point readers to more specific subjects, like fashion or rooster snake killer. Many of the tidbits in the volume are food-related. A resort in Mexico, for example, offers a primo taco with caviar, lobster, and more for patrons willing to shell out $25,000. In Palau, Micronesia, fruit bat soup comes with broth and the entire creature. And in 2017, a no-hands, yak yogurt drinking contest took place in China. But the assemblage by the 100-year-old Ripley franchise also showcases remarkable people and animals. Short, intermittent interviews spotlight individuals such as Alabamian Lucy Gafford, who dabbles in shower-hair art, and Laetitia Ky of Abidjan, Africa, who sculpts her hair into shapes or hand gestures. Other species are curious as well: Officials in Bangkok put a wild macaque monkey on a strict diet after tourists’ leftover junk food precipitated his obesity; and mantis shrimp have a punch that’s faster than humans can blink. Even pop culture often astounds: A honey bun resembles the titular alien of the 1982 film E.T.; and William Moulton Marston, inventor of the polygraph machine, also created Wonder Woman. The educational value of this collection is without question. While details on animals, culture, etc. come in brief, singular paragraphs, they are informative and will surely send readers, young and old alike, to the internet to learn more. The prose is particularly respectful of the variety of cultures and figures throughout but is occasionally tongue-in-cheek. For instance, a write-up on open-air urinals in Chongqing, China, warns readers to “Pee afraid. Pee very afraid.” Similarly, the story of World War II spy Virginia Hall, who had a prosthetic leg, stresses that she escaped Nazi-occupied France on foot. Despite a good deal of contemporary trivia (from the previous year or two), much of the material, as the title implies, covers the last century. Information on the Towers of Silence, where Zoroastrians in Iran and India have long placed their dead for vultures to pick apart, is even accompanied by a 1926 sketch by company founder, Robert Ripley. There’s little wasted space on the pages of the coffee-table book, which boasts an abundance of vibrant photographs. Sometimes they’re shocking, like making a spiderlike fly larger than life or offering a close-up of an Ethiopian tribe’s annual stick fight, particularly the pre-event consumption of cow blood. But the pictures are more often astonishingly beautiful: A two-page display of the Kite Festival in Guatemala is a veritable explosion of giant, multicolored kites. The volume likewise takes advantage of new media. Some stories focus on YouTubers and Instagrammers while a recurring section, “Your Uploads,” are tales that readers have submitted.
Chock-full of surprises, insight, and learning opportunities.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60991-217-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ripley Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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